The Age of Theory

It occurred to me All over again How weird the obsession  With the JFK assassination  Perhaps really is. There are those Who accept  The original conclusion, And others Who even today, Here in 2021, Hold out hope That we will learn Differently. And I ask you now, If we did,  What would be The result? If we learned Some nefarious plot, What would it change? Apply a fresh layer Of narrative horror? So many  Have already said So many horrible things, What would it change? “We are better than that?” And if not  So what? So what If we let it happen? We just elected Another president Despite another attempt To claim king making By any other name, The verbal political jests And maybe sometimes worse, And maybe even sometimes better. So what?

Maybe I would have to be A native of other countries  To know, But it seems to me That America is unique In being obsessed With its meaning, It’s significance. Some people, Because of its size, The scope of its influence, See only the bad. And some people, Either from gratitude Or patriotism,  See only the good. Of course there’s both. And probably not much more.

The country itself is approaching  Only 245 years But its history goes back farther, Beyond Jamestown, certainly, But let’s just spend A moment On that one, Around which I have a memory Of a movie In which someone says, “Let not America go wrong in her first hour.” It might be said That everything that has followed Has been a reiteration  Of that plea.

When he was a boy Digging in the dirt Outside his palace bedroom, Priam discovered, On the very morning Of an earthquake  That had toppled many buildings in Ilium, The ruins of a prior age. And in the span of years Following the spectacle Of Helen’s absconding, There was another boy Digging another hole, And finding ruins of a prior age. And many more years beyond that, Four hundred or so, There was a poem That in millennia to follow Scholars could not agree If its author were mythical Writing about mythical things. Such are the ruins of Ilium.

When Schliemann was busy about excavating The ruins of Troy The joke was if he didn’t find them in one layer He definitely did in the next, So that layer by layer he found anew The ruins of Troy. Now, one way to view this Is that he was a fool on a fool’s errand,  Desperate and desperate to locate, at long last The ruins of Troy. The other, of course, Is that he never lost hope, That one day he would discover  The ruins of Troy. Hope, against all adversity, Has been what the Demagogues Have been declaring  For nearly two hundred years. In all that time They have  unearthed numerous examples of The ruins of Troy, And somehow found them shining, Yes, even The ruins of Troy, That city conquered In myth Heralded by a blind poet  Who probably didn’t even exist, Who didn’t even mention the wooden horse That of course Schliemann would never find No matter how much he poked in The ruins of Troy. And yet those Demagogues Persist In their foolish quest of hope, Foolish, A...

I don’t want to be That guy But a bad personality  Is such a lousy way to live. If you find yourself Digging a hole Either you meant to Or you should probably stop. And that guy Should have stopped. He should have stopped Even if it meant actual success, At any other point, In his various deals. As it turns out, Eventually it solves nothing. Eventually it’s just a hole in the ground. Eventually you have to stop digging. That guy never learned that. Don’t be that guy.

Every day What is really being said is, “This justifies me, This justifies what I said, This justifies what I did.” And of course it is so.

In every equation there are variables But you don’t know what they are Until you have solved it. To approach it as if you do Betrays the unknown And thus solves a different equation entirely, Which is to say, You end up walking in circles And lies.

“Only under Extreme pressure Can we change Into that which it is in our most profound nature To become.” I confess  To finding This philosophy  Insane. You are what you are Even when you change; The Protean Way Is reinvention, Not a diamond from coal, A pearl from an oyster: The same thing Only different. If you preach revolution  You ought to expect it, Which goes both ways.

I’m reading a book By a prophet of metamorphosis  That sees change As an agent of destruction, A sundering of parallel, Diametrically opposed worlds. As prophets go He is both brilliant And insane. That’s the age In a nutshell.

From thenceforth I will call them The Demagogues, A party that has existed Mainly to bask in its ego And to smear as a rule Its rivals, A party that has been wrong Since 1829, And which sneered at all attempts  To heal the rifts that shattered and splintered A house, Which housed the first openly White supremacist, Which boasted its new deal But won prosperity  Through the bloody old deal Of war, That unpopular bastard Son Father And grandfather Of the nation, Which dropped not one but two Of the most desperate and heinous bombs In world history And has never once been called to account for it, Which took as a party platform The identity of a schoolyard bully Gleefully smirking And calling names, Which stoked unrest And twiddled while the flames burst, Which cried for four long years  The election was stolen, And then sat there assuring us For four days of unprecedence That no such possibility  Could have occurred again, Despite failing to produce Any conclusive evid...

It’s strange To grow up And live in A country At a time When it Dominates. I don’t mean It’s the best But that it is Inescapable. And because it is It’s hard to see Clearly. Now, clearly I’m talking about A particular country And I don’t need To name it. You would know Even if it weren’t  In the title. It’s the country In all the titles. Good and bad. We’re about  Twenty years Away from it being A hundred years Of that. It’s a hundred years, Now, Of it almost  Being that. But not quite. The big struggle  Internally, Is to admit that, That we blew that shot A hundred years ago. We made it necessary  To wait  Another Twenty years. And that twenty years Is the gulf between us And everyone else We haven’t even Considered. And so there it is, Today, In its present states. We don’t know What we are. The world around us Doesn’t know. But everyone tries to guess, And only muddles it further. It is what it is, A thoroughly unsatisfactory answer, Sure, But as accurat...

There will always be those Who lash out at a world That seems determined to have boundaries  By creating absurdities  That somehow create new boundaries In the process, And this, This is a crisis  Of finite proportions,  For it ends in cycles, Wheeling about quite madly If also happily, If you can forgive The paradox, This rolodex of woe On this uncertain earth, In which too much doubt Produces misplaced certainty, When just the right amount Would solve, Well, Everything.

In the age of the scientific method Does it not behoove us To strive for new conclusions  Rather than interpret everything Dogmatically  Through evidence Supporting a single hypothesis?

I fear we won’t emerge  From the chaos of one year If the seeds planted Four years ago Forty years ago One hundred forty... What I mean is If you want things to work You have to stop breaking them.

Sometimes, Somehow it feels as if The ground beneath my feet Is constantly shifting, I don’t know, As if to dislodge me, To challenge me, To force me onward, Haltingly, In a suspect manner, The gaze of others Uncertain, Inscrutable, Unreliable, Proximity that uncertain beast, The game we are meant to play Without rules That some of us acquired anyway. But what can I say?

Oh to be held hostage By pocket giants; That is the tragedy Of this age.

Once again It seems To have been Exaggerated.